pwned
Pwned means completely beaten, dominated or humiliated. It’s a deliberate misspelling of “owned,” and it’s usually pronounced “pōned” or simply “owned.”
What pwned means
To pwn someone is to crush them, usually in a game. If you lose badly, you got pwned. In hacking and security circles, being pwned means having your computer, account or data taken over. The breach-checking website “Have I Been Pwned?” uses the word in exactly that sense.
Examples
- “We got pwned in the first round.”
- “He pwned the whole server with a sniper rifle.”
- “My email showed up in a data breach. I’ve been pwned.”
- “Pwned!” (shouted after a big win)
How to pronounce it
There’s no single correct way. Common versions are “poned” (rhymes with “owned” with a p), “pawned,” or just saying “owned.” In text it rarely matters.
Where pwned comes from
Merriam-Webster says pwn is a respelling of “own,” probably from a typing error, since p and o sit next to each other on a QWERTY keyboard. It dates the word to 1999, while Dictionary.com places it in the early 1990s. It became so established that “pwn” was added to the Official Scrabble Words list in 2015.
Related terms
Find more gamer talk in our gaming slang dictionary.
Example sentence
They pwned us so hard we rage-quit after ten minutes.
Similar words
owned, rekt, destroyed
Notes
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